Never has such a vague word been used by so many to mean so little. If you want to discuss the merits of various DBMS's, at least discuss actual features. Saying "DBMS X is/is not 'enterprise'..." just makes you look like a PHB who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Judging from several comments here, it sounds like some people are expecting to get a lot MORE than what they paid for - they're expecting to get permanent copies of as many DVDs as they want, by getting the DVD, copying it, and sending it back the next day. I would call that "freeloading," as well as "illegal" and "ruining it for the rest of us."
It's none of Netflix's business what I do with the movie while I've rented it. I could be copying it, or I could actually be watching movies that quickly, or hell, I could just be renting them and sending them back unwatched. Doesn't change the fact that the service I pay for, and the service they advertise, is that I rent the movie and they ship it to me right away.
If copying a movie is "freeloading" off of anyone, it's the MPAA's member companies. Netflix isn't in the business of making movies, or even making money off movies. They're in the business of moving physical media to my house; media that just happens to have movies on it. The actual movie, when I return it, and what I do with it while it's here, is irrelevant, as long as they get it back.
It'd be nice if the WoW GMs were as proactive about removing gold farmers, or as responsive about bugged quests/mobs, as they are about ruining the fun of honest players. It really does seem that the worst things about the game are the people running it.
I'm not saying Oracle customers shouldn't demand quick turnarounds on bugfixes, but this guy kind of comes across as a control-freak who wanted to make a big corporation jump through a hoop and when they didn't, he went crybabying to securityfocus.
More likely he wanted to publish the results of his research, since that would be the reason why he did the research in the first place. He wasn't trying to make Oracle jump through a hoop by releasing this info three months after he told them about it, he was doing them -- and, indirectly, as a customer of Oracle's, you -- a courtesy by giving them three months to fix it before telling anyone else in the first place.
The interesting thing is that you can disclaim responsibility all you want, but that doesn't stop the people who write the checks from remembering you screwed them and going somewhere else next time.
That's what vendor lock-in and consultants are for.
Is this the de-facto standard within IT, and for all jobs within IT?
There's no standard, like just about everything on the business side of IT. If you stick around in the same area or with the same types of companies, you'll find a lot of them have similar practices, but IT workers are employed in too many different places by too many different types of organizations in too many industries to find even a single practice that all of them share.
Furthermore, training especially seems kinda off the map in a lot of companies, even larger ones. I usually ask about the availability of training in job interviews, not because I'm particularly interested (I'm a big enough nerd that I usually keep myself up to date without consciously making an effort), but because I figure it makes me look gung ho. I virtually never get a concrete answer, even at Fortune 500 companies.
I do have to give props to my last employer, though. Training didn't just fall out of the sky, but if you found something you wanted to learn and brought it up you generally got it. Management was even pretty lenient about it having to apply directly to your job.
Yeah, there's an ignore list with a max of 25 names. I've been playing since release day, and my ignore list has been full since about an hour after I got the game installed. The idiots in WoW triumph over the ignore list feature with sheer numbers.
"Perhaps we should be more understanding with our moody bosses?"
Perhaps not. Most meetings are scheduled by said moody bosses because they can't be bothered to read their email or meet one on one with the people who are actually getting work done. Sure, they're busy otherwise, but most of the reason they're busy is because of this meeting culture that equates sitting around a table talking about what you're going to have your minions do (as soon as they get out of the meetings you force them into) with getting code written and products shipped.
The main reason I hate meetings so much is because I get the impression that the only people getting anything out of them are the ones contributing nothing useful to the project in the first place. I don't care if your job is to sit between me and your boss, if you can't keep up with a project you're a part of without dragging me away from my actual work to hand-hold you through what's going on twice a week, you're wasting my time.
That was 90% of the meetings last place I worked, and this accounted for probably half the reason I got fed up with the place and quit before Christmas. Maybe I'm just not cut out to work somewhere that has more than a few employees, and I've never claimed to be a people person, but everybody I talked to felt much the same way, so I feel at least somewhat validated.
Face to face contact is great, but the instances where that face to face contact's value outweighs the cost of herding a bunch of people into a conference room for a chit chat are few and far between when there are deadlines to meet, IMHO.
Japanese has a whole bunch of kanji, but the various words in the language can be formed from a much smaller (hiragana, mentioned in TFA) character set that represents the various syllables in the words. These syllables are always pronounced consistently, unlike languages like English where sometimes it seems like nothing is consistent (and I'm a native speaker). Thus, the first thing that came to my mind was that teaching a robot spoken Japanese is probably quite a bit easier than teaching one English (though neither is a trivial task, obviously).
I know nothing about Japanese sign language, and practically nothing about American sign language, but I believe American sign language shares a similarity to written Japanese in that there are signs for common words most any competent signer knows (similar to kanji), and any particularly uncommon words can be signed out with the letter (or in the Japanese case, hiragana syllable) signs. Thus, I doubt teaching a robot enough Japanese sign language to be understandable wouldn't be any harder than teaching a robot American sign language. Which, once you've turned the speech into letters/syllables in the speech recognition part and programmed in the gestures, would be pretty much trivial. Japanese children's TV and manga aimed at kids (I'm told) mimmicks this behavior by mixing the simple kanji school children will have learned at a young age with the hiragana for the words that aren't expected to be known.
I'm shooting from the hip here based on what little experience I have with this stuff, so feel free to correct me, experts.
My black nano is scratched beyond belief, while my RAZR, which is both "pretty" and gets pretty much the exact same treatment (lots of riding around in my pocket and sliding around in my car) doesn't have a mark on it.
Customer: I can't fix my computer. Apple: Yeah, well, all these people working in our retail stores can, but they're geniuses, so don't feel bad. Customer: Thanks! Fuckin' nerds...
By making the people who fix the computers out to be geniuses, you spare the egos of all the helpless people who walk in without a clue what to do about the Sad Mac:)
If anything the comment you replied to was meant to be 'Funny'. Chill out, douchebag, everybody knows Child's Play is a good thing. One of the motivations for its creation was to show gamers are decent, normal people, who care about others; and as a big 'fuck you' to Jack Thompson and people like him who think they're just deviates training to blow people up by practicing on their consoles.
It probably does get under his skin on some level, and, as long as the kids still come first, I can't see anything wrong with that. Can you?
Slashdot Mirror
That's smart. I've got a CVS repository on my main machine that's rsync'd nightly to my laptop and a remote box, but I like your idea better :).
Never has such a vague word been used by so many to mean so little. If you want to discuss the merits of various DBMS's, at least discuss actual features. Saying "DBMS X is/is not 'enterprise'..." just makes you look like a PHB who doesn't know what he's talking about.
It's none of Netflix's business what I do with the movie while I've rented it. I could be copying it, or I could actually be watching movies that quickly, or hell, I could just be renting them and sending them back unwatched. Doesn't change the fact that the service I pay for, and the service they advertise, is that I rent the movie and they ship it to me right away.
If copying a movie is "freeloading" off of anyone, it's the MPAA's member companies. Netflix isn't in the business of making movies, or even making money off movies. They're in the business of moving physical media to my house; media that just happens to have movies on it. The actual movie, when I return it, and what I do with it while it's here, is irrelevant, as long as they get it back.
It'd be nice if the WoW GMs were as proactive about removing gold farmers, or as responsive about bugged quests/mobs, as they are about ruining the fun of honest players. It really does seem that the worst things about the game are the people running it.
Game. Set. Match :P
Based on your description, I'm sticking with WoW.
Our government has managed to completely revolutionize lying, I don't think your services will be needed.
My government can beat up your Internet.
My hero? Count Chocula.
More likely he wanted to publish the results of his research, since that would be the reason why he did the research in the first place. He wasn't trying to make Oracle jump through a hoop by releasing this info three months after he told them about it, he was doing them -- and, indirectly, as a customer of Oracle's, you -- a courtesy by giving them three months to fix it before telling anyone else in the first place.
The interesting thing is that you can disclaim responsibility all you want, but that doesn't stop the people who write the checks from remembering you screwed them and going somewhere else next time.
That's what vendor lock-in and consultants are for.
There's no standard, like just about everything on the business side of IT. If you stick around in the same area or with the same types of companies, you'll find a lot of them have similar practices, but IT workers are employed in too many different places by too many different types of organizations in too many industries to find even a single practice that all of them share.
Furthermore, training especially seems kinda off the map in a lot of companies, even larger ones. I usually ask about the availability of training in job interviews, not because I'm particularly interested (I'm a big enough nerd that I usually keep myself up to date without consciously making an effort), but because I figure it makes me look gung ho. I virtually never get a concrete answer, even at Fortune 500 companies.
I do have to give props to my last employer, though. Training didn't just fall out of the sky, but if you found something you wanted to learn and brought it up you generally got it. Management was even pretty lenient about it having to apply directly to your job.
The Hurd would have to work first.
The main quote in the Eurogamer article is from a guy who runs the "WoW Gold Price List".
"Oh yeah, you should trust people! Just because they're Chinese doesn't make them a gold farmer. Can't we all just get along?
Hey! Wanna buy some gold?!"
Yeah, there's an ignore list with a max of 25 names. I've been playing since release day, and my ignore list has been full since about an hour after I got the game installed. The idiots in WoW triumph over the ignore list feature with sheer numbers.
"Perhaps we should be more understanding with our moody bosses?"
Perhaps not. Most meetings are scheduled by said moody bosses because they can't be bothered to read their email or meet one on one with the people who are actually getting work done. Sure, they're busy otherwise, but most of the reason they're busy is because of this meeting culture that equates sitting around a table talking about what you're going to have your minions do (as soon as they get out of the meetings you force them into) with getting code written and products shipped.
The main reason I hate meetings so much is because I get the impression that the only people getting anything out of them are the ones contributing nothing useful to the project in the first place. I don't care if your job is to sit between me and your boss, if you can't keep up with a project you're a part of without dragging me away from my actual work to hand-hold you through what's going on twice a week, you're wasting my time.
That was 90% of the meetings last place I worked, and this accounted for probably half the reason I got fed up with the place and quit before Christmas. Maybe I'm just not cut out to work somewhere that has more than a few employees, and I've never claimed to be a people person, but everybody I talked to felt much the same way, so I feel at least somewhat validated.
Face to face contact is great, but the instances where that face to face contact's value outweighs the cost of herding a bunch of people into a conference room for a chit chat are few and far between when there are deadlines to meet, IMHO.
Japanese has a whole bunch of kanji, but the various words in the language can be formed from a much smaller (hiragana, mentioned in TFA) character set that represents the various syllables in the words. These syllables are always pronounced consistently, unlike languages like English where sometimes it seems like nothing is consistent (and I'm a native speaker). Thus, the first thing that came to my mind was that teaching a robot spoken Japanese is probably quite a bit easier than teaching one English (though neither is a trivial task, obviously).
I know nothing about Japanese sign language, and practically nothing about American sign language, but I believe American sign language shares a similarity to written Japanese in that there are signs for common words most any competent signer knows (similar to kanji), and any particularly uncommon words can be signed out with the letter (or in the Japanese case, hiragana syllable) signs. Thus, I doubt teaching a robot enough Japanese sign language to be understandable wouldn't be any harder than teaching a robot American sign language. Which, once you've turned the speech into letters/syllables in the speech recognition part and programmed in the gestures, would be pretty much trivial. Japanese children's TV and manga aimed at kids (I'm told) mimmicks this behavior by mixing the simple kanji school children will have learned at a young age with the hiragana for the words that aren't expected to be known.
I'm shooting from the hip here based on what little experience I have with this stuff, so feel free to correct me, experts.
He's right, you know :)
Psst! You may need to have your eyes examined...
Were you just dissin' sidetalking?
It's on.
My black nano is scratched beyond belief, while my RAZR, which is both "pretty" and gets pretty much the exact same treatment (lots of riding around in my pocket and sliding around in my car) doesn't have a mark on it.
iPods scratch easily.
I'd look at it the other way around:
:)
Customer: I can't fix my computer.
Apple: Yeah, well, all these people working in our retail stores can, but they're geniuses, so don't feel bad.
Customer: Thanks! Fuckin' nerds...
By making the people who fix the computers out to be geniuses, you spare the egos of all the helpless people who walk in without a clue what to do about the Sad Mac
Roughly translated, it says, "I, for one, welcome our new BitTorrent overlords."
Just don't store your password in Gaim. Why is that so hard?
If anything the comment you replied to was meant to be 'Funny'. Chill out, douchebag, everybody knows Child's Play is a good thing. One of the motivations for its creation was to show gamers are decent, normal people, who care about others; and as a big 'fuck you' to Jack Thompson and people like him who think they're just deviates training to blow people up by practicing on their consoles.
It probably does get under his skin on some level, and, as long as the kids still come first, I can't see anything wrong with that. Can you?